


Fiery First Cause

by jesterlady



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:35:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesterlady/pseuds/jesterlady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death has been Sarah's constant companion.  In the final moments, she recalls all that brought her to this point and how her beliefs have been changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fiery First Cause

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Up to 2x22  
> Disclaimer: I dont own TSCC. The title is by Eugene Peterson

She remembers her first real death. Not just hearing about it like the way she had with her grandfather. Not knowing it had been because of her like Ginger and Matt. (Ginger) If she thought about it, perhaps the entire LA police force had been killed because of her. No, her first real death was Kyle Reese. Kyle, the man who had scared her to death. The man who had saved her from death. The man who had loved her, without cause, across time. The man who had left her alone, a blank, dead look on his vital face. That was when she had met death and death never left her side after that.

It was because of the Terminators. The metal bastards who had taken her life and the life of her son. People died all around her. Countless people. Stacks of them, piled to the sky. They might as well have been wearing tags that said: killed for the Connors. She could never quite believe that the Connors were worth all that. But the machines seemed to think so.

It came to be that the sight of a computer, or even something simple, like a toaster, made her want to smash it to bits. How John ever became a computer genius, she’ll never know, it’s not like she ever kept one around until recently. Machines were the enemy; they’d given her death and taken her life and love. All she had was John.

Who could be taken away as well. Could be taken away with her sanity. Could be returned with a machine in tow. The sight still gives her nightmares. Everything gives her nightmares. She’d never quite understood how her son could reprogram a machine with the face of his father’s killer and send it back to her and expect her not to terminate it herself. But she hadn’t until it asked her to. He asked her to. The face of her damnation was a turning point.

Life never got easier, it got harder. Once one machine turned angel was gone, another appeared. And this one wasn’t meant for her torment. But somehow this one, this girl, this Cameron, was almost more of a demon to her. Uncle Bob had stolen her boy’s heart, now Cameron was playing thief and bringing death. Or did she evade it, a willow-o-the-wisp reaper, dancing lightly over one just to bring on another? 

Death had terrified her from the moment it took Kyle. She couldn’t believe that it would mean a reunion with him or even peace. But she meant to go out fighting. So to learn of a disease, something that could strip life and her son from her, something that no amount of thermite could burn, no time travel could completely distil the fear of; that was the real horror. Not the machines. And it was irony at its most bitter.

She recalls standing with the Terminator in the backyard, listening to a machine read off her fate. Cameron told her she was clean. How could she believe her? How could Cameron from the future truly not know the answers to these questions? But what she remembers most is asking pitiful question after desperate question, begging, pleading with a machine to tell her why. To give her something definite to cling to. And the horrific thing was the machine could empathize. She could ask, ‘Am I?’ She could be a time bomb too. They were explosions together, swirling in their own uncertainty, waiting for the right moment. How cruel that she should share this with a machine.

A machine that took her son. The one person who meant everything to her. Cameron was the thing he loved. He told his mother he loved her. But when the time came, he chose artificial love. He stood in the bubble and she doesn’t understand why. She doesn’t condemn why. Hadn’t he always been of the machine world? But he wanted to leap through time and find it, eagerly embracing the metal that owned his heart. 

It is only the memory of death and the memory of Kyle and the memory of that which she abhors that keeps her from going with her son. It is the memory of a machine, desperate to know the truth about herself, and another, once the face of death, now the face of life. It is the memory of Derek, lying face up with a bullet hole in his forehead, not standing with the grass between his toes or staring across the endless view of graves that house his brother. It is her own resolution to live. She will stop it. And not so that he never went, but so that he never had to go. It is her job, no matter how many machines came from the future. She is Sarah Connor, mother and protector of John Connor. She faces death every day, disease or machine, and she won’t let this be the final death.


End file.
